


Room Enough, Time Enough

by roughmagic



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Explicit Language, Friendship, Gender-Neutral Pronouns, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Major Character Injury, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Other, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reader-Insert, Sign Language, Spoilers, Suicidal Thoughts, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Wilderness Survival, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-29
Updated: 2018-02-05
Packaged: 2019-03-10 23:51:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13512363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roughmagic/pseuds/roughmagic
Summary: There’s a cold moment of clarity that almost makes you shudder, even under the hot sun.What makes you think you can do what the Boss can’t?Reader/Quiet(Involves Mission 45 Spoilers!)





	1. DECAMP

**Author's Note:**

> For a long time after I finished MGSV, I couldn't pick it up again because I felt so junked up about how Mission 45 ended. I recently bit the bullet (had it force fed to me, actually, Quiet really doesn't go easy on you) and replayed 11 as many times as I had to for Quiet to come home... I was really interested in that feeling, so, I wanted to write about it!

You aren’t trained for espionage. There hadn’t been a day since you set foot on Mother Base that you hadn’t lived and breathed your assignment to Combat, and you thought you fit the role well. People think of your unit as being straightforward, meat and potatoes, dependable bootnecks, if they aren’t co-opted into something more subtle.

Everybody who doesn’t end up with Ocelot’s gang gets the same lecture and drills about being incognito amid the enemy. How to avoid detection, basic tricks so you don’t absolutely shame the Diamond Dogs with your terrible lying skills, acting normal under pressure. They’d given you a lot in training, and only more ever since. Advice, practice, honing you into a real Diamond Dog. Twenty-four carat.

So it feels like you’re personally pushing a knife into Big Boss’s ribs when you take a deep breath and prepare to open the hatch to Requisitions. Everything you had done up until now could be undone, but that was about to stop.

You’ll think later your brain was probably playing tricks on you, filling empty silence, but a song on the radio passed you by on the wind, and you practically kicked down the door.

It’s a good omen when it’s Razor Ox working the checkout desk. This office within Requisitions is decorated with some of the target dummies placed around base, so you know what you’ll be aiming for when you leave. You’ve been in before, used to be a regular. He knows you by name, and you’ve leaned on him for harmless stuff before. Foot in the door technique.

He looks up from his crossword puzzle and gives you the kind of look that tells you he’s already dealt with some silliness today from others, and isn’t going to take any more from you.  

You take a breath in through your nose and smile. “I’ve got a favor to ask.”

Ox is a big buy, a broad face and broad shoulders. One of the types where you don’t know if the name picked him or if he grew into it. Old enough to be your dad and just as unamused by nonsense. But he still puts down the crossword. “I’m listening.”

You drag your toe around on the tiled floor and look as bashful as possible. “So… my accuracy numbers aren’t what they used to be.”

“Somebody told me you got stuck on base for a while.” Whether or not he heard more than that or why you had been escapes you, and he doesn’t give you any expressions or tone shifts to go on. “Anybody’s bound to be rusty.”

“I’d really, _really_ like to get in a couple days of practice before the next deployment, but—I’m embarrassed, okay? I don’t want anybody to know that I fell behind.”

“There’s no shame in practicing, why else do you think all this exists? We don’t maintain the target dummies just for the Boss, although sometimes I think he’s the only one who uses’em.” Ox waves a hand at the array of guns and tools displayed behind him, only accounting for a fraction of what Requisitions actually has on hand these days, even for practice use. “Anyway, Hound, what exactly are you asking me for?”

You put your hands together in front of you gingerly, the universal beg. “Could you maybe leave me off the books? Just let me check out some standard-issue stuff, go knock down some targets, surprise Jade Tree Frog with how much my skills haven’t degraded?”

His eyes rolling and sigh are practically synced up. “You Combat guys have a lot of ego problems, you know that?”

“Ox, I will owe you the world’s biggest favor. The _biggest_.”

“Believe me, I know. Don’t tell anybody I did this for you, okay?” The crossword puzzle gets set aside, and he leans a bit closer over the desk. “What are you checking out?”

“Just a rifle scope and tranq pistol. Small stuff. It’ll be back before you miss it.”

“You get a blank check and you write it for that?” Ox’s eyebrows do a complicated dance of disbelief and then weary acceptance. “I oughta tell the Commander your shameful secret, you know how he is about the basics.” Despite the threat, he stills turns to fetch what you’d asked for from the display.

Normally, even the vague presence of Miller in a conversation could get you to give up any shenanigans, but this situation surpasses your most basic survival instincts. “If he crutches me to death, my ghost will haunt you.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He sets down the detached rifle scope and the tranquilizer handgun on the desk, pushing them towards you.

You thank him until he waves you off to the practice range, and you promptly betray his trust by using the pipes to climb past the office, back the way you came, ignoring the way the sea air snatches at your face. All it takes is an open window and a foothold outside to get around the platforms, if you aren’t scared of heights and the sound of your boots squeaking on the bulkhead. When you come back, you should tell the Security folks about that route, maybe get a camera or something out there.

 _If_ you come back. You try to ignore that thought and its friends, trying to push them all behind as you double-back to your quarters and pick up the rest of your equipment. It all fits in a big bag, and you snap all the buckles and straps into place, going through old motions automatically.

Nobody takes much notice of you as you leave your unit’s quarters and head towards the helipad on the R&D platform, walking with a briskness that suggests you have somewhere to be and every right to get there as quickly as possible. It either works or it’s unnecessary, because nobody stops you all the way right up until Bloody Scarab looks over his clipboard at you as his unit gears up to get under way.

The helicopter is still on the pad, but the other team doesn’t seem to notice you as they load up their gear and bullshit with each other.

You open your mouth to give Scarab the spiel you’d been looping internally for the past week, and nothing comes out. There’s a cold moment of clarity that almost makes you shudder, even under the hot sun. _What makes you think you can do what the Boss can’t?_

Scarab doesn’t seem to notice. “Screaming Hound? What are you all kitted up for, Tree Frog’s unit isn’t scheduled for anything.”

Like snapping your fingers, your body language goes casual and you shade your eyes as you look at him. “I was hoping to hitch a ride with you guys, save everybody some trouble. I’ve got business in the area.” 

“Business? What kind?”

“A special errand to run for Major Ocelot,” you say, giving him your best polite smile. Scarab has probably heard the rumors about you, that you’re some kind of berserker wildcard, and you’re banking on it seeming like Ocelot would use you for something weird. “Or would you like me to go get him to ask for clearance from you?”

Nobody ever wants to do that, and that’s how you get all the way to Afghanistan without anybody bothering you.

 

They drop you off on the outskirts of the Lamar Khaate zone, and you wave the helicopter off until it disappears into the dusty blue. Hopefully nobody would get on Scarab too badly for letting you lie your way out here.

Next order of business is posting up in the struggling shade of an ironwood tree and setting up for the hike. The first thing to go is your Diamond Dogs patch, but as you hold the overshirt’s fabric in your hands, it’s still hard to do. It’s your identity. Your family. 

You have to worry it away with your pocket knife but the patch comes off, and you slip it into an inner pocket in the jacket, close to your heart. You aren’t leaving it behind, but you don’t want to broadcast to everyone that you’re a lone Diamond Dog, ripe for hostaging. The last thing you want is for somebody to have to come extract you. God forbid, the Boss having to come extract you. That’s the nightmare scenario.

Secondly, the map. You’ve got it cobbled together out of the available operational area map that everybody knows, whatever you could Xerox from the other books and atlases in the library, with all the relevant information from the mission report scrawled or traced onto it. You mark your location, time of day, and everything else you can, before conferring again with your compass. You know where you are now, but out in the desert… getting lost would be the second worst thing that could happen.

The first worst would be losing all your water, so you triple-check what you’ve brought with you. No leaks, no unnecessary condensation. It’s heavy, but you’ve been training steadily with the same weight in a pack so that it isn’t too heavy to bear. And, unfortunately, it’ll only get lighter. Realistically, you’ll need to find water and hope you’ve got enough purification tablets, or you’ll have to procure some from somebody else.

“From Russians,” you mutter out loud to yourself, wiping sweat off your face and trying to refold the map to be more manageable. “Just get used to the idea.”

This was your first time back in the area: whether through luck or Miller’s backhanded sensitivity, your squad had only deployed into Africa in the time between your last visit to the area and now. The way the light bounces off the white sand and color leaches out of the far mountains is familiar, you know the smells and the heat and the taste of the place, but you are alone. No Tree Frog, no Buzzard, no Raptor, no Ibex. Just Screaming Hound, gone rogue, alone with an impossible goal and a tragic backstory.

Whatever. You only had one thing to do out here, and if it didn’t work out, you could die without much fuss or anybody watching. You hold that thought like a worry stone as you settle into your hiding spot amid the tall, scrubby grass and resolve to watch the patrol units, see if you can’t eavesdrop on their radios and listen for anything unusual. There’s no point in moving while the sun is still up, and you can store energy for the first hike over the ridge and into the desert. Off the edge of the map, where they filled in empty spaces with monsters.

Your main wish is that you had somebody to talk to—how badass would it be to crack open an eye and look across to Buzzard and say, _We’re heading off the edge of the map… but this time, we’re looking for the monster, right?_

Quiet would roll her eyes. She always thought you were cheesy, worse than the action movies they projected out on the side of the platforms on Saturday nights when the Boss has been gone for weeks. You watched one with her one time, high up on catwalk and far enough that the sound had felt just a breath delayed, bounced off the bulkheads.

The memory puts a cold stone into the pit of your stomach, something like pain and dread. You’d lost people before, and the happy times you’d spent with them had never poisoned you like this had. It made you run this far, into the desert where the only sound is the wind and the sand blowing through it. No music.

You’d give anything to see her roll her eyes at you. In fact, you were.

Giving everything.


	2. DISJOINED

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please mind the tags! There's nothing (imo) overwhelmingly explicit, but I want you to take care of yourself.

You’d gotten in trouble, and that was how you met her the first time.

After all the lectures you’d gotten about combat fatigue and shellshock and how it was always better to request time off to get your head straight or talk to someone on the Medical Platform, how there wasn’t any shame in it, and you’d do more for Diamond Dogs by being honest than being stoic, it just hadn’t felt like it applied to you. For people like Miller, who had actually lost something, sure, but you’re in one piece, even if life had been bad before your new home. A sob story didn't seem all that important next to real loss.

And besides, you didn’t want them to know you’d shown up as damaged goods, and by all rights, nobody would’ve found out for probably a while longer, if it wasn’t for Tree Frog making a call to spare the enemy.

He’d decided to stop and let the patrol pass, the five of you hunkered down behind a wall made of wedged stone. Boredom led Ibex and Raptor to eavesdropping, and you’d joined them to try and up your Russian comprehension, which tended to lean towards reading rather than hearing. There’s a lot of new vocab peppering through your earpiece as the three of you watch the four other soldiers stretching their legs and taking turns pissing.

Ibex is the best linguist and the first to scrunch down behind the wall, looking shifty. Raptor seems uncomfortable when you ask him about a word meaning, right before one of the Russians mimes fucking into the air, comrades laughter or waving him off. The footnote of _Civilian casualties reported high in AO_ that had been on the mission assignment stands out in your thoughts, and you don’t need to know what they’re saying, because you’ve heard it before.

You have the vague memory of Jade Tree Frog asking what you thought you were doing when you stood up. You didn’t need to explain when you shot the first Russian, or the rest of them, or what was left of them, until your clip was empty. It’s most sense memory, offal and gunpowder and standing in a glut of bloody sand. When you pulled out your machete to keep going, Tree Frog punched you in the back of the head, and tactfully fultoned you home in the truck the Russian had shown up in.

You don’t act like it was a big deal now, although when it wakes you up in the middle of the night it feels like it’s the only thing that’s happened to you in your entire life. But you can’t dwell on these things.

That’s what the Boss says to you, anyway. After the angry reprimand from Miller, after the slow burn tranquilizers from Ocelot, after the blood’s gone stiff and tacky on your bootlaces. He waits patiently until you can bear to look him in the eye, even if it’s just to search for his disappointment. But he just tells you _don’t let it swallow you, Hound. Give yourself room to come back to us._ It helps, but he could’ve dangled you off the side of the platform and you would’ve thanked him for it.

Anyway-- temporary removal from your combat unit, a psych workup, and even one brief moment of solitary confinement later, and nobody really wanted to see you stuck on the Med platform any more than you wanted to be there. Tree Frog vouched for you to come back but Miller vetoed it, so the Med staff kept you for a while. Manual labor was a relief, and you don’t think anybody’s ever quite put the shine on the whole Medical archipelago like you did. A bird didn’t shit on a helipad without you scrubbing it off within the hour. You’d bartered a cracked scope off Glacier Harrier and used it to watch for anybody littering, posted up on a construction scaffolding like a sniper’s nest.

It felt better than being out in the field, which was new. It felt tangible, the smell of cleaning solution and impressed whistles from the old timers who compared everything to the first Mother Base made it worth it. You could see yourself helping your comrades and there wasn’t any guesswork to be done about it, no wondering, nobody suffered. No tough calls to make. No wrong reactions.

The only thing you don’t get to clean are the holding cells inset into the deck and the Quarantine platform, and it drives you up a fucking wall.

You start sending letters to Commander Miller and actually get letters back, something about “observing strict quarantine procedures” and “proper containment of hazardous elements,” just a bunch of horse shit. You’ve seen Ocelot hang out in it without so much as a gas mask. Even the Boss visits. It’s just weird stuff that’s stored cells like that sometimes, but the main one that you care about belongs to Quiet.

What he doesn’t forbid you from doing is cleaning the graffiti off the signs telling nosy Dogs like you to stay out. So you do, and then it comes back. It keeps coming back, day after day, nasty shit in paint that dries quickly and takes a long time to scrub off. It shouldn’t bother you, but the fact that people you know, people you may even like, take time out of their day to think and feel and subsequently write stuff like this makes your guts lurch. It’s stuff like Quiet being a freak, Quiet should go away, Quiet’s a witch, Quiet’s a bitch, Quiet’s cunt is sideways, Quiet should die, and you lose it after four days of trying to stay cool about it.

It seems rude to just bang on her ceiling and yell down at her, so you walk downstairs and into the ring of shade around the least effective cage in the world. But it designates her space, and the Boss has given her this space, so it’s hers and you’ll respect it.

You knock on the bulkhead and wave, as if she hasn’t been tracking your process the entire time. Laid out like a big cat in the sun, soaking it up. “Do you know who’s marking up the signs out there? Do you see them do it?” You still have to raise your voice a little to be heard over the music.

Quiet blinks at you slowly, and you suspect, mostly for your benefit.

“I don’t know you care, but I do. It--” You’d had to shut yourself up and set your teeth together for a moment so your mouth wouldn’t open for the wrong words. “I’d just like to stop it. I’d like it to stop.”

The truth is that if you caught whoever was doing it, more than one person or not, you’d probably beat them until somebody knocked you out, and it wouldn’t look good. It might be the end of your time here, considering how much trouble you’ve caused in total. But you can’t just ignore the graffiti, ignore the fact that the people supposed to be watching your back think it’s alright to talk that way about another person, one that the Boss has said is family-- It gave you the kind of feeling that all the time in the sun scrubbing and polishing and enjoying life was for nothing, and you were right back where you started. Balanced on a hair trigger over stuff that shouldn't bother well people as bad as it does for you.  

Quiet doesn’t move from her bed and just looks at you. _Looks_ at you, and suddenly you see yourself for how you must seem to somebody who has no context for your life-- sweaty from the sun, covered in industrial soap suds and water, hands shaking and about to cry over graffiti. Absolutely bonkers.

When she does stand and cross the small space to lean against the bars, you feel aware of her beauty like a second sun. Constant and scorching. You don’t even want her to be able to see you like this, maybe at all.

But she stretches out her hands and beckons you forward, and you don’t pay attention to any of the procedures or warning signs and slip right past the lines demarcating where it’s safe to be, close enough for her to catch your eye.

Her hand lifts and forms signs you don’t know, you know what they are, you know by the pace and deliberateness of it that they must be letters, but you don’t know what letters. It’s devastating. Quiet doesn’t talk to anyone, she’s trying to talk to you, but you don’t know what she’s saying.

You say something inelegant and take off running, absolutely full-tilt to the Med Platform’s library. The guy on duty gives you a pained look at the state of your soggy clothes, but knows better than to hassle you. Stranger things happen all the time. You find the dictionary you’re looking for and Xerox the alphabet page out of it, and by the time you’ve torn back to Quiet’s cell, your chest is burning and your lungs are working overtime.

But you can wave the paper and ask her to tell you what she wanted you to know, one more time, please.

Quiet sits down at the edge of the cage and you don’t hesitate to the do the same. The bulkhead is warm from the sun but there’s enough shade to keep it from being uncomfortable. You watch so, _so_ carefully, cross-referencing every sign.

_D-O-N-T_ “Don’t?” _C-R-Y_ “Sorry, I just-- I--” She puts her other hand over your mouth to shut you up, watching you watch her spell. _O-V-E-R I-T._

It makes you want to cry all over again.

You steal the sign language primer from the library with every intent to bring it back, or at least requisition your own copy so you can write in it. It’s a future you problem, the present you is too caught up in the joy of being able to talk with Quiet. Finger spelling goes quickly and you both share the book to pick up full words. You’ve read enough of it to know that you’re both ignoring a lot of grammatical rules in favor of constructing your own language, but you’ve asked and it doesn’t bother Quiet.

Not a lot seems to bother Quiet, actually. The loud music can be a bit much for you, and she’s sure it was supposed to be a psychological torture thing at first. But now she just likes it: they keep the songs cycling through fairly often, and the Boss finds new tapes all the time. The sun is always welcome, the rain more so, there’s nothing she really wants in terms of creature comforts. (You know that because you asked, even though it would have been highly illegal to give her anything. This does not stop you from smuggling books to her, although they’re all your own. She has a lot to say about your taste in reading.)

You’re so excited that it breaks your heart the first time you see her signing to the Boss-- in _your_ language, and the dark oil slick inside of you reminds you that of course she would want to talk to the Boss, everybody does, she’s in love with him, everybody’s in love with him, it’s impossible _not_ to be in love with him-- but then she points at you from halfway across the platform and signs your name, _Hound_ , the two snaps for _dog_ interspersed by the silly finger guns for _hunt_ , and you don’t feel quite as bad.

The Boss tries it once and she grins at him, the dead-eyed lip curl that is as rare and precious as a sunshower.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! We'll switch back and forth between internal/external chapters for a while, if all goes as vaguely planned.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, as always! I'm excited to head out on another adventure with everyone! As always, I'd love to know what you think!


End file.
